Damien Hirst – Psalm: Diligam te, Domine

Description

Damien Hirst, Psalm: Diligam te, Domine, is a screenprint in colors with glaze. This print is signed and numbered from the edition of 25.

Hirst’s Psalm prints draw directly from the butterfly collages of his larger gloss paintings. With the butterfly wings separated and ordered in a mandala-like pattern, their arrangement mimics the precision of a collector’s display. Also calling to mind the exquisite stained glass of Europe’s great cathedrals, the wings of these creatures unite the celestial and the earthly to present us with the possibility of beauty in death.

Hirst began using butterflies in his work as early as 1989. Describing the insect as a ‘universal trigger’, he has explained: “Everyone’s frightened of glass, everyone’s frightened of sharks, everyone loves butterflies.” The ‘Psalms’ form part of the ‘Kaleidoscope’ series, conceived by the artist in 2001 after he found a Victorian tea tray decorated with intricate patterns of butterfly wings. The works reference the spiritual symbolism of the butterfly, used by the Greeks to depict Psyche, the soul, and in Christian imagery to signify the resurrection. The perfect symmetry which characterizes the ‘Psalms’ alludes to both the displays of light, color and beauty as presented in Gothic stained glass windows, and the circular patterns of Buddhist mandalas.

Since emerging onto the international art scene in the late 1980s, Damien Hirst has created installations, sculptures, paintings, and drawings that examine the complex relationships between art and beauty, religion and science, and life and death. From serialized paintings of multicolored spots to animal specimens preserved in tanks of formaldehyde, his work challenges contemporary belief systems, tracing the uncertainties that lie at the heart of human experience.